@IanPolaris
This got long. Apologies in advance for the wall of text that follows:
Firstly, I soundly reject the idea that every person on the entire planet, down to the last human, elf, and dwarf, has to be directly threatened before it is considered acceptable to neutralize said threat. If there
is a credible threat, it need not threaten the entirety of Ferelden, much less the whole of Thedas or even the entire world. It only has to threaten one location.
I do agree that as far as DA goes, you have a situation where the Chantry has dictated the general opinion of mages for a millenium, and has largely contributed to the very problem it claims to try to prevent. The Tevinter Imperium has been used as an excuse to imprison mages, and after almost ten centuries of this, yes it is easy to see that when it is the law of the land to tear young children away from their families and deny them any future contact, that mages are for the most part denied the right to get married or to have children, and within the Circles you have clergy drilling into mages' heads that magic is a curse, that the Maker hates magic, that the methods of the Chantry-dominated Circles are necessary, etc., then you definitely have a recipe for creating the very monsters you seek to prevent. There are real-world examples of what happens to a people when, for example, you systematize racist thinking: the generational dysfunction and self-hatred that resulted from forcing American Indian children into boarding schools is the clearest example I can think of to illustrate this. So, yes, there's no question that the system of locking mages away from the world and treating them as guilty before proven innocent turns into a self-perpetuating prophecy. A far better system would be to open up whatever training it is that gives templars the ability to counter magic, making it available to the general population, rather than keep it a deeply-guarded secret--not to mention getting their templars addicted to lyrium, both of which point to the Chantry's less than noble motives--or having templars posted in every locale as a sort of police force, to deal with rogue mages, and to have the Circles act as schools to teach mages to control their magic without sealing them away from their families or the world at large.
But it cannot be said that mages are
only a threat because of the Chantry's teachings. That denies the fact that demons are attracted to mages like iron to magnets, apparently. It denies that mages are as capable of choosing to do evil as any other person, and unfortunately have a decided advantage over non-mages. You state that the situation in Ferelden's Circle only happened because of centuries of Chantry oppression as if that were absolute fact. While it could be argued to have been a contributing factor, if nothing else, you do not have the authority to say beyond any doubt that that is
precisely and only why it happened. There is plenty of evidence of Uldred being power-hungry quite separately from his opinion of whether the Circle was an unjust institution, that you cannot say absolutely that things would have happened differently; it is quite possible that even if the Circle were nothing but a school and mages were allowed to come and go as they please, that Uldred would still have decided he wanted the power and domination he could only achieve through making a deal with a pride demon.
Also, once you are in the middle of a firefight, motivations don't matter. My personal opinion of Orsino is that he thought the situation was hopeless, and turned to blood magic because he thought it had come down to his having nothing left to lose. In fact I think that was the opinion of almost every mage we see in Kirkwall who turns to blood magic. Once it comes down to your life, why shouldn't you resort to the most drastic and arguably most evil of measures? But a person in a kill or be killed situation doesn't have the luxury of determining whether their foe is acting
out of malice or a desperate last-ditch effort to survive. That includes the templars under Meredith. Sure, yes, you could argue that their iron-grip is what led to the rampant blood magic. But we see that not all those templars were carrying out abuses. Some were quite humane. When they're tasked with annuling the Circle, and they see abominations and blood mages coming at them, it's quite likely that they're going to conclude that the Knight-Commander was right in her belief. It doesn't matter what the actual circumstances are, those templars don't have time to do much more than go "S---, blood mage!" and defend themselves in carrying out the annulment. It's too easy for those of us sitting at our computers or consoles watching the scene play out to pass judgment on who is responsible for the templar ending up in that situation; that templar is very likely to reach a different conclusion, based on their direct experience, which at that moment is going to be that their purpose is to defend the world against the evils of magic, and here they are faced with everything they've ever been told about magic being true, and coming at them with with murder in its eyes.
And, once again, since I must repeat myself often when discussing things with you, it seems,
there are no real-world equivalents to mages.
No real world group of people has ever posed an actual threat against another group by virtue of their ethnicity or nationality, even if their enemies want to believe otherwise. Mages in DA, however, have been shown to be potential time bombs. Me, personally, from my comfortable 21st century morality--speaking as a person who has the luxury of being able to debate this issue from a purely
philosophical standpoint and has never found herself faced with life-threatening hardships--yes, I say that the Chantry's oppression of mages, from its literal imprisonment of them to its tradition of preaching them as responsible for Original Sin, is largely to blame for the terrible situations that drive most mages to acts of depradation. But still you have the fact that all mages, wherever they fall on the moral compass, have the potential for doing grievous harm to others, even when they don't necessarily mean to.
No, it is not right to commit genocide against a people for what they
might do. But neither is it right to spare one group of people if one of the possible outcomes of that sparing is that said group of people slaughter other people. In either situation, you only have possible, not definite, outcomes. But sparing, say, one hundred mages could potentially result in the slaughter of a thousand non-mages. If you're in that situation, chances are you don't have the luxury of saying "no, I'll spare the mages and wait to see what happens." If you do make that choice, one of the possible outcomes is having to accept that anyone who dies at the hand of those mages died as a result of your inaction. This is the moral ambiguity that Bioware is trying to communicate: yes, there's a chance that sparing the mages will result in no harm. But there's also a chance that sparing the mages will result in greater harm than would come of executing them. So you, the player, is expected to make a choice
not between a moral good and a moral evil, but to have to decide between the dilemma of sparing one group at the expense of another.
Someone is going to die. (And yes I realize that there's always the possibility that nobody will die, but it's a fact of life that the hoped-for option isn't necessarily a practical one to be basing your decisions on). Your choice is to decide which is less morally repugnant: to kill a
smaller group of people over a potential risk of harm, or to be prepared for the very real possibility that an even greater number of people may die for the mercy you provided the first group. If you kill the mages, if you are at all a decent person, you are likely going to hate yourself for a good while, even if you recognize it as the lesser of two evils. But if you don't kill the mages, and the mages in turn run amok and thousands of other people suffer for it, you're going to have just as much trouble living with yourself for that outcome, since your decision to spare the mages brought it
about. Hence, moral ambiguity and grey areas.
Again, I roleplay from a pro-mage position, because I have too difficult a time divorcing my DA character from my own personal morality, and the one time I tried to side with the templars, for all that I could understand the templar position, I just couldn't bring myself to play that role, so I reloaded. But that doesn't mean I don't fully understand the other side of the equation, and also can grasp something that you apparently can't: sometimes there are no right answers, no good
answers. Sometimes there's going to be blood on your hands whatever you choose. Insisting that there is but one morally just response is a luxury of principle that not everyone has the privilege choosing. Dragon Age illustrates that point well.
Modifié par Silfren, 03 mai 2011 - 05:24 .
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Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
:lol:
